Between Eros and Thanatos – the analyst in the territory of the negative

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point the true story of Christopher McCandless, as recounted by Jon Krakauer in his book Into the wild (1996), to reflect on the complex articulation of the death drive in psychoanalytic practice and its technical implications in the face of radical manifestations of detachment and destructiveness. By situating McCandless as a particular example – one whose trajectory reveals both the yearning for the absolute and the refusal of affective bonds – it opens a space to consider how the analyst finds themselves confronted with deobjectalization through the transference. Drawing on Freud’s drive theory, the article explores the theoretical and technical challenges raised by the emergence of the death drive, mobilizing André Green’s reflections on the negativity of the work of the negative, along with René Roussillon’s and Thomas Ogden’s formulations concerning clinical work in the zones of non-representability within the intersubjective field. It argues that clinical handling of the death drive requires a paradoxical listening: one capable of receiving the impulse toward absolute zero while never abandoning the hope of its conversion into symbolic life. McCandless’s journey thus serves as an allegory for the analyst’s clinical impasses when faced with what is unassimilable, calling for a rethinking of clinical technique in territories where psychic life flirts with its own extinction.